Empathy is a trainable skill, not a fixed personality trait.
Zaki frames his parents' contentious divorce as an 'empathy gym' that forced him to repeatedly practice understanding two people with irreconcilable perspectives. He generalizes this into a broader claim that empathy behaves like a muscle: it can be strengthened through deliberate, difficult practice rather than being a trait people either have or lack.
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Empathy splits into at least three separable components: emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and empathic concern.
Different brain systems support catching someone's feelings (emotional empathy), figuring out what they're feeling and why (cognitive empathy), and wanting their well-being to improve (empathic concern). People with autism spectrum disorders tend to struggle with cognitive empathy while retaining emotional empathy; people with psychopathy show roughly the opposite profile.
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Self-reported empathy scores have declined measurably since roughly 2000, based on decades of survey data.
Citing research by Sara Konrath comparing standardized empathy questionnaires from 1979 to 2009, Zaki notes scores have eroded over time, with the sharpest decline concentrated in the recent decades. He is careful to flag this as correlational, not causal.
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Rising solitary living and more transactional daily interactions may be contributing to the empathy decline, though the causal link is speculative.
Zaki cites that among people 18-34, ten times as many live alone today as in 1950, and that in parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles over 90% of residents live alone. He is explicit that no controlled experiment can isolate this as a cause, but points to evidence that anonymous interactions do not favor empathy.
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Hearing someone's voice makes people less likely to dehumanize them than reading the same content as text.
A study by Juliana Schroeder had people either listen to audio recordings of others' political opinions or read a transcript of the same opinions. Listeners were less likely to dehumanize the speaker than readers were, suggesting that stripped-down text communication removes cues that normally trigger empathy.
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Empathy is inherently parochial by default: it favors people already inside your in-group.
Zaki agrees with Paul Bloom's diagnosis that empathy tends to be biased toward one's own tribe, citing research that intranasal oxytocin increases care for in-group members while decreasing care for out-group members. He disagrees with Bloom's conclusion that we should therefore abandon empathy, arguing instead that people can recognize and deliberately counteract the bias.
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High in-group empathy, even alongside some out-group empathy, predicts unwillingness to compromise in intergroup conflict.
Zaki cites his colleague Emile Bruneau's research showing that measuring only out-group empathy fails to predict aggression or rigidity in conflict; you also have to measure in-group empathy. People who are extremely empathic toward their own group resist compromise even when they also show empathy toward the other side.
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Which identity you activate determines the size of your empathic in-group.
In a study of Manchester United fans, writing about love for the team predicted helping fellow fans but ignoring an injured Liverpool fan; writing about love of soccer itself broadened helping to Liverpool fans too (though not to a fan in a blank jersey). Zaki concludes that shifting from a narrow identity (team) to a broader one (sport, nationality, humanity) expands who counts as 'us.'
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Empathy carries real personal costs for people in caring professions, sometimes pushing them to shut it off defensively.
About 50% of oncologists report intense heartbreak delivering bad news, and even medical students simulating bad-news conversations show measurable stress responses. Zaki calls the resulting self-protective withdrawal 'defensive dehumanization,' seen starkly in death-row workers who dehumanize inmates, especially those directly involved in executions.
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People sometimes physically avoid situations that would trigger empathy, because empathy itself feels costly.
In a 1970s study by Mark Pancer, a charity donation table with a picture of a suffering child or a person in a wheelchair caused passersby to walk further away than a neutral table did, suggesting people actively avoid empathy triggers to dodge the emotional or obligatory cost of feeling for someone.
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Acting and reading fiction measurably build empathy, more than nonfiction or other art forms.
A study by Thalia Goldstein found teens trained in acting gained more empathy over a year than teens trained in visual arts. Separately, Zaki cites correlational evidence that children and adults who read more fiction score higher in empathy, and experimental evidence that even brief fiction exposure produces small, reliable empathy gains; he jokes that reading scientific journal articles does not have the same effect.
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A brief virtual-reality simulation of becoming homeless produced empathy gains toward homeless people that persisted a month later.
Zaki's VR study put participants through scenes of eviction, living in a car, and riding a bus used by homeless people for shelter. A month after the simulation, participants were less likely to dehumanize homeless individuals and more supportive of affordable-housing policy than a control group, illustrating that immersive perspective-taking can durably shift empathy.
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Books referenced
The War For Kindness: Building Empathy In A Fractured World - Jamil Zaki - Zaki's book, the spine of the interview; he draws his empathy-gym framing, the police-empathy fieldwork, and the VR-homelessness study from it
Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion - Paul Bloom - Vedantam raises Bloom's argument that empathy is inherently parochial and biased; Zaki agrees with the diagnosis but rejects Bloom's prescription to abandon empathy
Media referenced
Sesame Street (Mark Ruffalo / Murray Monster empathy clip) - show - Vedantam plays a clip of Mark Ruffalo teaching Murray Monster what empathy is, as a plain-language example of cognitive plus emotional empathy
Wafaa Bilal's paintball performance piece (Domestic Tension, 2007) - other - Bilal's month-long livestreamed art installation, where strangers online could fire a paintball gun at him, frames the whole episode's question about anonymity and cruelty versus connection
Companies
Stanford University - Where Jamil Zaki is a professor and runs his empathy research lab
Washington State Criminal Justice Training Center (CJTC) - Zaki profiled this police training center in his book to study parochial empathy among officers
Techniques and frameworks
Empathy gym / deliberate empathy practice - Zaki's core metaphor: empathy is a trainable skill, not a fixed trait, built through repeated practice under difficulty (his parents' divorce, acting, reading fiction)
Three components of empathy: emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, empathic concern - Zaki's framework for decomposing empathy into distinct, separable psychological and neural systems
Naive realism - The psychological bias of assuming your own perception of the world is simply reality, which blocks empathy for people who see things differently
Altruism born of suffering - The finding that people who have survived trauma sometimes redirect that pain into caring for others going through similar suffering
Summary
This episode kicks off Hidden Brain's annual "You 2.0" summer series with psychologist Jamil Zaki of Stanford, author of "The War For Kindness: Building Empathy In A Fractured World." Vedantam opens with the story of Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal, who in 2007 livestreamed himself in a gallery room for a month while letting anonymous internet strangers remotely fire a paintball gun at him roughly 70,000 times, an anonymity-fueled cruelty experiment that also drew strangers who showed up in person with gifts and comfort. That double-edged case, anonymity enabling both aggression and connection, frames the whole conversation.
Zaki grounds his interest in empathy in his own childhood: his parents, from Peru and Pakistan, divorced acrimoniously when he was 8, and shuttling between two households with irreconcilable worldviews became what he calls an "empathy gym," forcing him to practice understanding two people simultaneously. From there he lays out empathy as three separable components (emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and empathic concern), notes that autism and psychopathy dissociate these components in opposite directions, and cites survey data showing self-reported empathy has been declining since roughly 2000, alongside a rise in solitary living and more anonymous, text-mediated interaction online. He is careful to flag this link as correlational.
The middle of the conversation turns to empathy's dark side: it is parochial by default, favoring in-group members (demonstrated by an oxytocin study and a Manchester United fan experiment), and it can actively fuel rigidity in conflict rather than resolve it, since high in-group empathy predicts unwillingness to compromise even when out-group empathy is also present. Zaki uses his fieldwork inside a police training academy, where officers showed strong empathy for a fellow officer involved in a fatal shooting of an unarmed man, as a live example of parochial empathy interfering with accountability.
Zaki also details empathy's personal costs: oncologists and other caregivers report real emotional injury from repeated empathic engagement, sometimes triggering "defensive dehumanization" as self-protection, and people will physically avoid situations (a charity table with a photo of a suffering child, a homeless person on the sidewalk) that would trigger costly empathy. The episode closes on interventions that build empathy deliberately: acting training, reading fiction, and a VR simulation of becoming homeless that produced empathy gains and support for affordable housing that persisted a month later. Zaki returns to his parents' divorce at the end, framing the core lesson as recognizing that "someone else's world is just as real as yours," an idea he calls the antidote to naive realism.
Notable Quotes
"I always think of my parents' divorce as an empathy gym for me that forced me to work out my ability to care about and understand other people." - Jamil Zaki
"It's almost as though we're leaving behind when we go online some of the cues that allow us to detect each other's real humanity." - Jamil Zaki
"In essence sort of turning up people's empathy, in that case, means turning up their parochialism." - Jamil Zaki
"Empathy at a deep level is the understanding that someone else's world is just as real as yours." - Jamil Zaki